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ALMA Cycle 4 Pre-announcement

The Joint ALMA Observatory (JAO) will start the next cycle of observing (Cycle 4) in October 2016. A Call for Proposals with detailed information on Cycle 4 will be issued in March 2016, with a deadline for proposal submission in April 2016. This pre-announcement highlights aspects of the Cycle 4 proposal call that are needed to plan proposals.

General information

ALMA Cycle 4 will start in October 2016 and span 12 months. It is anticipated that 3000 hours of 12-m Array science observations will be available for successful observations of approved projects. Observing time will also be available on the Morita Array (a.k.a. the Atacama Compact Array, or the ACA); the number of hours available on the ACA will be announced in the Call for Proposals. The remaining time on ALMA will be reserved for engineering, computing and scientific testing to extend and optimize ALMA capabilities.

The key dates for Cycle 4 are given below.

  • 22 March 2016 : Release of the ALMA Cycle 4 Call for Proposals and observing tool, and opening of archive for proposal submission
  • 21 April 2016 : Proposal deadline
  • August 2016 : Result of the proposal review process sent to Proposers
  • October 2016 : Start of ALMA Cycle 4 observations
  • September 2017 : End of Cycle 4 observations
  • See previous proposal calls

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    ALMA Taiwan Mock Review

    With the ALMA Cycle 4 proposal deadline on April 21 fast approaching, prospective users should get the proposals prepared soon. As in previous ALMA proposal cycles, we will hold a mock ALMA proposal review.

    According to past experiences, proposals fail sometimes due to 1) unclear science questions or goals and/or poorly designed experimenting methods/approaches, but also often due to 2) poor writing or last minute compilation. The purpose of this review is to try improving the quality of ALMA-T proposals for better success rate by enforcing potential users to prepare the proposals early, thus, to at least eliminate the last minute writing and to further sharpen the science ideas.

    This mock review is open to all Taiwanese users including the ones outside of ASIAA. The proposal submission deadline is set to 2016.04.01, before the long holiday weekend. Full proposal, including scientific and technical justification, figures and tables, shall be to submit to almamockasiaa.sinica.edu.tw in pdf format.

    Technical and scientific review comments will be sent back to the PIs through email roughly on 2015.04.11. Face-to-face discussion with the ARC staffs or review panel members could be considered and arranged. PIs can incorporate these comments into proposal revision before the "true" submission.


    Useful proposal preparation materials

    The following are some presentation files from our recent ALMA Users Workshop 2015 that was aimed at helping people prepare for their ALMA Cycle 3 proposals and the use of CASA data analysis software:

  • ALMA, Taiwan ARC Node, & ES Cycles by Chin-Fei Lee
  • ALMA Observing Tool by Yu-Nung Su
  • ALMA Observing Simulations with CASA by Kuo-Song Wang
  • (Accompanying data files .zip)
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